


Moonlight

by PlanceGardener21



Category: Voltron Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, plance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21963001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlanceGardener21/pseuds/PlanceGardener21
Summary: While the Paladins are camping out on an alien planet, and Lance can’t fall asleep, so he decides to go for a late-night swim in a nearby forest lake. There he encounters a beautiful female swimming in the moonlit water. Is she a mermaid? A naiad? A goddess?
Relationships: Lance/Pidge | Katie Holt
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2019 Plance Secret Santa Gift Exchange.

Moonlight

After months of space travel, the team had been fortunate enough to find an uninhabited Earth-like planet to land upon and make camp while their lions recharged. Pidge had gathered data on the environment and determined that the air was breathable and the water was safe to drink.  
Lance tossed and turned on his thin camp mattress, unable to sleep. His mind was preoccupied with thoughts of his fellow teammate for whom he had developed some very strong feelings, and he wondered how long he could keep his feelings a secret. She was always foremost in his thoughts all day, and apparently all night as well. This particular night was quite warm, too warm to wear his his Paladin pajamas. He had gone to bed wearing only a pair of blue boxers and a white T-shirt. Hunk was asleep, snoring just loud enough to distract him. Silently, Lance had crept out of the tent he shared with Hunk and laid out his mattress, pillow, and light blanket under the starlit sky, hoping that the night air would be cool enough to help him sleep. He had no such luck. He tossed and turned even more, then finally settled upon counting the unfamiliar stars and naming the new constellations that he had imagined when gazing at the night sky, but to no avail. He still couldn’t fall asleep. Thinking of the nearby lake with it’s cold, clean water, he made up his mind: it was time for a late night swim.   
He quietly entered the tent to grab a towel from his supplies, then put on his sneakers. The lake was only a short walk from the Paladins’ camp. When he arrived at the shore, he hung up his towel on a low hanging tree limb, took off his shoes, and removed his T-shirt, then hung it up next to his towel. Just as he was considering removing his shorts to bathe, he heard a sound. Something was moving in the water. He froze, realizing that he had forgotten his Bayard back at the camp. If some dangerous creature lurked in the dark water before him, he had no way to defend himself!   
Lance’s view was obscured by the reeds that grew along the lakeshore, but as he moved silently through the shadows he found a break in the barrier of reeds a bit farther along the shore. The tranquil surface of the lake was broken by a slim figure of someone who had just emerged from the depths. A mermaid? No, he wouldn’t be lucky enough to meet one of those again. The figure turned to one side, and he saw a lovely silhouette in the moonlight. Definitely female, but with only a subtle hint of feminine curves. She had a bosom, but she definitely wasn’t buxom enough to be Allura or Romelle. She wasn’t naked, but seemed to be wearing some type of green sports bra and briefs, and her skin was pale by the light of the planet’s single moon. He just stood there, transfixed by her graceful movements through the water. His breathing quickened. She was so beautiful he couldn’t stop staring at her.  
“Who’s there?” asked a familiar voice. It was Pidge! Lance began to panic. Pidge would kill him if she knew he had been spying on her while she went for a midnight swim in her underwear. He should have fled, but it was too late. She was swimming toward him, and suddenly stopped several feet from the shore.  
“Lance? What are you doing here?” She sounded rather upset.  
“Uh, hi. I was just going for a late night swim.” He hoped it was dark enough to hide how much he was blushing.  
“You shouldn’t be here!” she hissed angrily.   
“Why not?”   
“Because I’m not dressed!” She had stayed far enough from shore that only her head and shoulders were above the waterline.   
“I’m not either. Anyway, I’ve already seen you swimming in your underwear, so it’s only fair that you see me swimming in mine.” He waded toward her until he was as deep into the water as she was. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night anyway? It could be dangerous.”  
“I couldn’t sleep,” she admitted.  
“Me, too. It’s too hot and Hunk snores louder than howling bogbeast.”  
She giggled. He swam closer to her, and she backed away from him a little. “Lance, it’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that this is a bit...awkward.” He hair was slicked back, and she wasn’t wearing her glasses. Even by the dim light of the full moon he could see that her cheeks were very flushed. Lance couldn’t take his eyes off of her.  
“You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about, Pidge. You’ve got a really cute figure,” he blurted out, saying the first thing that came to mind.   
“Oh, so you have finally realized that I’m a girl and you’re going to start flirting with me now?”  
“I am a connoisseur of female beauty, Pidge. I can say with great sincerity that you are as beautiful as a mermaid and as entrancing as a naiad.”  
“Don’t you mean as entrancing as a siren? Anyway, since I am the Paladin of the Green Lion, shouldn’t I be a dryad instead of a naiad?”  
“You know your mythology, don’t you?” He grinned at her.  
“So do you, apparently.”  
“I passed the time by reading a lot of myths, legends, and fairytales when I was a kid.”  
“Then you know what happened to Actaeon.”  
“Yeah,” he said dreamily. “He was spying on the beautiful virgin goddess Artemis in all her naked glory while she bathed in a stream.” He waggled his eyebrows and smirked at her with a devilish glint in his eye.   
Pidge’s face was red, both with anger and embarrassment. She glared at him. “You know Artemis was so enraged at Actaeon for being such a perverted Peeping Tom that she turned him into a stag.”  
“Well, I guess he couldn’t resist the beauty of a naked maiden, so the goddess punished him with antlers for being so horny.” He laughed at his own joke.   
Pidge rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I don’t have my Bayard with me.” She swam away from him. Lance took that as a challenge and swam after her.   
She stopped in the center of the small lake, and floated on her back. He caught up to her and floated beside her. For a long time they just drifted side by side beneath the starry night sky, at peace with the luminous glories of the universe reflected in the still, dark water of the lake. For a moment, there was no war, no empire, no genocide, no fear, no death. There was only the lake and the forest and the two young people, far from home, but not alone. Never alone. They had each other. They always had each other, Lance realized.  
It was strangely quiet in the woods that night. On Earth there might have been the sound of nocturnal animals or insects in the darkness, but here there was a stillness in the air, a silence broken only by their voices.   
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Lance said softly. “I honestly didn’t mean to spy on you. I didn’t even know you were out here when I decided to go for a swim.”  
“I’m not offended, not really,” Pidge replied. “I’m just not used to it.”  
“Not used to what?”  
“Being looked at that way.” Clearly, she was still embarrassed. Pidge certainly could have passed for a young boy when Lance first met her, but not anymore. She could no longer hide the fact that she was growing up to be a very attractive female.   
“Pidge, you know how much I love enjoy giving compliments to beautiful women.”  
“You normally flirt with all the pretty girls you meet even if you barely even know them. This is different.”  
“Because we’re best friends?” he asked.  
“That’s one reason, but there’s more to it than that.”  
He swam upright, gazing at her scantily clad form in the moonlight. She then turned herself upright, hiding most of her exposed body in the water. “What’s wrong?” he asked.  
“Stop doing that!” She seemed more frightened than angry.  
“Stop doing what?”   
“Stop looking at me that way!”  
“Why? What are you afraid of?” He gazed at her lovingly, with such a gentle expression that she looked down, too embarrassed to meet his gaze.  
“I’m not Allura,” Pidge said, with her eyes downcast.  
“I never said you were.”   
“I thought you had a crush on her.” She looked up at him accusingly.  
“Not anymore. Anyway, she doesn’t like me that way.”  
“Oh, so now you’re going to flirt with me because every other girl in the Universe has turned you down?”  
“Hey!” Lance looked offended. “That’s just mean, Pidge. Being rejected all the time really hurts, you know. I am not some Casanova who just loves women and leaves them. I just want a certain someone to be my girlfriend, with the intention that someday she’ll be my wife. I want to be in a real, committed relationship with this particular young lady, but I’ve been so afraid of rejection that I have never told her what she means to me, so I wasted a lot of time, flirting with girls that didn’t really matter to me, while trying to work up the courage to tell the girl I really care about what she means to me. I’m serious about this, and about her. The truth is, I’m really just a hopeless romantic,” he said with fervor. “Or maybe just hopeless,” he added sadly.  
“I’m sorry. What I said was a bit harsh. I am just trying to protect myself.”  
“From me?” Lance asked. He was looking at her apologetically.  
“From getting my heart broken.” She looked so small and fragile when she said those words that Lance was silent for a moment, allowing himself to fully comprehend her meaning.  
“It’s going to take every bit of whatever courage I have to say this, Pidge, but if you like me that way, then you have nothing to fear. You are one of the people that I care about the most in the entire Universe, and if you feel the same way, you will make me the happiest man alive.”   
“You really mean that?” Her lower lip trembled and her eyes welled up with tears.  
Lance’s voice cracked a little when he replied. “Yes. I love you, Pidge. I’ve loved you for all of these years that we have been in space together, and I have finally been able to admit to myself that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone. I think you are the most amazing girl that I have ever met.” Overwhelmed by his own feelings, he tried not to cry, but he did in spite of his best efforts to hold back tears.   
Her own tears slid silently down her cheeks in the moonlight. He touched her face, gently wiping them away. “I love you too,” she said, her voice quivering. “You—you’re the only one that I’ve ever—“  
Lance didn’t hear what she was going to say next. He stopped her trembling lips with a kiss as he clasped her to him, his arms wrapped around her waist. He felt her arms stiffen against his chest and then relax as she wrapped them around his neck. She pulled him towards her so he could deepen the kiss. Lance was overwhelmed with desire for her, and he kissed her with all of the passion he had kept hidden for so long. Pidge was trembling, perhaps from fear or from the cold lake water or both. Lance didn’t hold back. He continued kissing her with so much intensity that he began to frighten her as well as himself. Then he pulled away, breaking the kiss, leaving both of them gasping for breath. “I love you, Katie Holt,” he said softly, his words reverberating through the still night air.  
Wide-eyed, she looked up at him and said, “I love you, too.” She hugged him, and he held her a long time as she trembled in his arms. “Lance, you are the only person that I have ever felt this way about. Please, please don’t break my heart.”  
“Never. I am yours forever if that’s what you want. I promise, I will never, ever hurt you. I adore you.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re cold. Maybe we should get out of the water.” She nodded, shivering.  
He followed her as she swam towards the shore to where she had left her towel, shoes, pajamas, and a change of underwear.   
“Apparently you think of everything. I’m going to be walking back to camp in soggy boxer shorts.”   
Pidge laughed at him. “I would like some privacy to change, please.” She had grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her torso as soon as they had reached the shore.  
“Okay. My stuff is down there.” He pointed to the tree where his shirt and towel were hanging. “I’ll wait for you. We can walk back together.”  
“Whatever you say, Loverboy. I guess you finally have a girlfriend now.” She grinned at him. Lance felt hot all over as he smiled back at her. He darted off to where he left his things, grabbed his towel and began drying off. Realizing that his boxers were a lost cause, he took them off and wrapped the towel securely around his waist, then put on his T-shirt and shoes. He heard footsteps approaching just as he hung his wet boxers on the tree limb.   
“Uh, hi.” He felt his face heat up. She couldn’t contain her giggles. “I’m gonna pray this towel doesn’t fall off.” Pidge covered her mouth, trying to suppress her laughter. “Not so loud. You’ll wake up the entire camp.” He held the towel around his waist tightly with his right hand.  
She was dressed in her too-large Paladin pajamas and sneakers, her discarded underclothes dripping wet in her left hand, and her own towel in her right. She hung her underthings up to dry next to his boxers. “You better hope no one finds this in the morning. The others will wonder what we were doing out here in the middle of the night,” she said teasingly. She kept her towel and rubbed her damp hair with it.  
“They will jump to conclusions and Shiro will kill me, on behalf of Matt and your dad.”  
“When we get back to Earth, you need to worry about my mom. She’s scarier than both of them put together.”  
“She’ll learn to love me. I intend to be her future son-in-law, after all.”  
“Don’t joke about stuff like that unless you really mean it.”  
“I do. I want us to be long term, death to us part and all of that stuff.”  
The smile that she gave him was angelic. She positively glowed with happiness at what he implied. “I think Katie Holt-McClain has a nice ring to it.”  
“I can see you have put some thought into this.”  
“I’ve loved you for a very long time, Lance McClain.” She hugged him tightly, and he embraced her, kissing the top of her head. He held her close for a long moment, smiling into her damp hair.  
“Pidge, my dearest, close your eyes,” he said in his deepest, most seductive voice.  
She looked up at him with adoration. “Are you going to kiss me again?”  
“Not yet. I want you to close your eyes because my towel is falling off.”  
“Wow, this is even better than turning you into a stag.”   
“Pidge!” He exclaimed over the sound of her hysterical laughter. Lance held the towel in place as best he could, but when he turned his back on her to fasten it more securely, it slipped from around his waist, revealing far too much of his backside. It was too dark beneath the trees to see anything, but she couldn’t resist teasing him. “Well, tonight this planet has two moons. Too bad only one of them is full.”  
“Pidge!” Lance was beyond embarrassed. He was wondering if this planet had any sinkholes that could suddenly open up to swallow him and take him out of his misery. When her laughter finally stopped, he bravely turned around to face her.  
She had broken two small leafless branches off of the nearest tree. “Well, Artemis is the goddess of the moon.” She held up the branches above her head like antlers. “These are for you, Actaeon.”   
“I think Actaeon has been punished enough for accidentally mooning the moon goddess.”   
Pidge laughed harder than ever at this comment, and Lance, grinning in spite of his own humiliation, grabbed her and kissed her cheek as she giggled. He kissed her forehead as she continued to laugh, and as he kissed the other cheek she was crying tears of mirth. When she finally dropped the branches, it was so that she could wrap her arms around him, stand on tiptoe, and kiss him passionately.   
When their lips finally parted, he grinned as he looked down at her and said, “You are never going to let me live this down, are you?”  
“Nope. I will be telling this story to our children and grandchildren. Let’s go back to camp, Actaeon.”

They did their best to remain quiet when they arrived at the campsite. “I think I’ll sleep outside tonight too,” she whispered.  
“Well, I am going to put some pants on, so my goddess won’t be offended,” he whispered back to her before slipping quietly into his tent, careful not to disturb Hunk’s slumber.  
When Lance exited the tent to return to his camp mattress beneath the stars, he was wearing light blue pajama pants with his T-shirt. He saw that Pidge was combing her damp hair, sitting on the mattress she had placed next to his, and he smiled at her. Before they lay down side by side, he kissed her goodnight, then covered them both with his light blanket. They held each other close as they fell asleep at last, bathed in the silvery light of the moon.


End file.
